24 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the closure. There is, accordingly, no rise in production elsewhere to compensate for the fall in coal production. Society as a whole loses by the amount of coal production foregone. Operating losses certainly do not, in themselves, justify closure. They do imply that the value of the coal produced is less than the various costs attributed to the pit. But to conclude that the pits should be closed presupposes that the resources which those costs represent would have been used elsewhere to produce something of greater value. If, on the contrary, those resources (both workers and equipment) would otherwise be idle there is no real cost to society from their use in producing coal. Society as a whole gains the value of the coal. The miners gain the difference between their take-home pay at work and what they would receive if unemployed. If the value of the coal they produce exceeds what they gain the rest of society benefits as well. This is reflected in the fact that costs of closure which the government incurs (redundancy pay,. dole and lost tax) exceed the operating subsidies which the government pays to keep the pits open. Before justifying the argument in more detail it is worth illustrating it with the example of the so-called highest-cost pits. A year ago the NCB claimed that the highest cost 12% of colliery output incurred £275 million losses. These collieries employed about 40,000 miners. In addition, a further 35,000 or so other jobs were dependent on these pits. Around a quarter of these were other NCB jobs (at pit. Area or HQ levels). The rest were in industries such as electricity, steel and engineering, which supply inputs needed by the pits. If the pits were to be closed and their losses eliminated, all these 75,000 workers would lose their jobs But the country would lose the coal which was worth around £ 475 million. Moreover, it was not only the miners and workers in supplying industries who gained from the pits being kept open. If it is assumed that they were all on average £ 70 per week better off in work than on the dole (a rather high estimate) they gained some £ 270 million. But the pits produced £ 475 million in extra output. So, "after taking account of the part required to pay the workers concerned, the rest of society actually benefited from the pits staying open to the tune of about £ 205 million extra production at its disposal. This is reflected at the financial level by the effect on government receipts and payments. Whilst the government would have "saved" £275 million subsidy if the pits had been closed, it would have lost some £ 480 million in lost tax revenue and through having to pay dole to the unemployed. So closing the so-called ''unprofitable" pits, whilst perfectly in tune with the NCB's task of increasing profitability, would have imposed substantial losses on the rest of society as well as on the miners concerned. In no sense then, can these "unprofitable' pits be labelled "uneconomic" from the point of view of society.